[ Thanks to D.C.
Parris for this link. ]
“When and why was DDRescue started?
I started ddrescue in the summer of 2004 because I wanted to
recover data from a failing CD-ROM and the tools available weren’t
appropiate for the task. If you try to rescue a failing CD-ROM with
dd, it may break your CD drive by excessive seeking.“Who are your primary users?
I think ddrescue has two types of users. The casual users, who
happen to have a disk drive with errors on it and want to read the
recoverable data from it, and the expert users, who use ddrescue in
creative ways like using ddrescue to erase all the good sectors of
a failing drive before returning it to the manufacturer without
overwriting the bad sectors…”